And with that, we are waving goodbye to the tenth month of the year. We are just two months away from welcoming a new year. How time flies! I hope the first ten months of the year have been kind to everyone. As time takes its natural course, I hope you were able to generate momentum as you pursued your goals and aspirations. I hope the rest of the year will reward you for all the hard work you put in over the past ten months. I hope it will be a period of celebration, blessings, and good tidings. But before I could wave goodbye to October, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. After a bookless stretch – yes, I couldn’t secure a copy of any book from May to August- I somehow made up for it in the past two months. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in October.
Title: May We Feed the King
Author: Rebecca Perry
Publisher: Granta Publications
Publishing Date: 2026
No. of Pages: 255
Synopsis:
She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.
He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn’t long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.
The debut novel from an award-winning poet, May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King ‘great’, and a life meaningful.
Title: John of John
Author: Douglas Stuart
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2026
No. of Pages: 400
Synopsis:
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.
While Cal wonders if any young men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.
John of John is the heartbreaking story of a young man’s return home and how the bonds of family life are torn y the weight of expectation. It confirms Douglas Stuart as one of the great British writers at work today.
Title: Taipei Story
Author: Rebecca F. Kuang
Publisher: The Borough Press
Publishing Date: 2026
No. of Pages: 304
Synopsis:
Yale student Lily Chen arrives in Taipei hungry: for family, for culture, for connection.
But her summer of discovery quickly unravels. Her classes are gruelling, her roommate unbearable, and a reckless, deeply awkward trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon ignites vicious gossip.
Then her grandfather dies.
Grieving and adrift, Lily must confront her own questions about the culture she inherited but never fully understood. She embarks on a wryly funny, often devastating search for understanding: of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.
All over one unforgettable summer in Taipei.
Title: Theo of Golden
Author: Allen Levi
Publisher: Atria Paperback
Publishing Date: November 2025 (2023)
No. of Pages: 384
Synopsis:
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from… or why…
His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers.
Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their “rightful owners.” With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered.
A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that binds us to one another.
Title: The Old Drift
Author: Namwali Serpell
Publisher: Hogarth
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 563
Synopsis:
On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called the Old Drift. Here begins the epic story of a small African nation told by a mysterious swarm that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. The tale? A playful panorama of history, fairy tale, romance, and science fiction. The moral? To err is human.
In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwilling retribution among three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives – their triumphs, errors, losses, and hopes – form a symphony about what it means to be human.
From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones, and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel sweeps over the years and the globe, subverting expectations along the way. Exploding with color and energy, The Old Drift is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.
Title: Primeval and Other Times
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Translator (from Polish): Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2026 (1996)
No. of Pages: 279
Synopsis:
Three generations in the life of a mythical Polish village.
For the denizens of Primeval, the world beyond its fields and forests is but a dream. The outcast Cornspike raises her daughter among the creatures and spirits of the forest. The squire Popielski loses his faith and becomes obsessed with a game where progress is attained only by dreaming the right kind of dream. Nonhuman beings – trees and mushrooms and archangels – have their Times, or stories, too, as do inanimate objects. Yet their Times are buffeted by the feral history of the twentieth century. Bloodshed, betrayal, and the dramas of daily living mark the birth, life, and decline of Primeval, making us consider afresh the stories by which we comprehend our own world and Times.
Title: Death is Hard Work
Author: Khaled Khalifa
Translator (from Arabic): Leri Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2019 (2016)
No. of Pages: 180
Synopsis:
Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the latest novel from a key chronicler of Syria’s catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares, armed with little more than simple determination.
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is currently estranged from his two siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother, Hussein, and his sister, Fatima, to help him get the body to Anabiya – ordinarily only a few hours’ drive from Damascus. There’s just one problem: Their country is a war zone.
Forced to navigate clogged roads controlled by competing militias whose behavior is at best lethally arbitrary, the siblings see their decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request balloon from a mild inconvenience to a daring odyssey. This is no country for heroics, however, and as Bolbol, Hussein, Fatima, and Abdel Latif’s rapidly deteriorating corpse are repeatedly captured and recaptured, sidetracked, attacked, and insulted, their journey devolves from a noble quest to a dark and absurd comedy.
Title: Trilogy
Author: Jon Fosse
Translator (from Norwegian): May-Brit Akerholt
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publishing Date: 2022 (2014)
No. of Pages: 170
Synopsis:
Trilogy is Jon Fosse’s critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Allida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav’s Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love, for which Fosse received The Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature in 2015.
Title: Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty
Author: Zyta Rudzka
Translator (from Polish): Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: 2024 (2021)
No. of Pages: 217
Synopsis:
Leokadia and Helena, two sisters nearing the end of their lives, live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. With the sticky heat of summer in the air, they share memories of youth with their fellow residents. But theirs are no ordinary stories. At the age of twelve, Helena and Leokadia were sent to Auschwitz, where Helena became one of the darlings of the notorious “angel of death,” Doctor Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer and physician who tortured prisoners, especially twins, under the guise of conducting scientific research on them. Fear and pride in their survival live on in the women, in ways both provocative and strange. Rudzka takes her novel to the very brink in her insistence on finding the words and narrative form to speak of the horrors of the camps and the simpler challenges of getting old.
Title: Nausea
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Translator (from French): Robert Baldick
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2000 (1963)
No. of Pages: 213
Synopsis:
Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times – existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realization that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.
